Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Under other circumstances, the flourishing Eastern and Western cores might have responded to climate change just as effectively as they had done when the Roman Warm Period began in the second century BCE. But this time disease and climate change—two of the five horsemen of the apocalypse who featured so prominently in Chapter 4—were riding together. What that would mean, and whether the other three horsemen of famine, migration, and state failure would join them, would depend on how people reacted.

  LOSING THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN

  Like all organizations, the Han and Roman empires had evolved to solve specific problems. They had learned how to defeat all rivals, govern vast territories and huge populations with simple technologies, and move food and revenue from rich provinces to the armies on their frontiers and the crowds in their great cities. Each, though, did all this in slightly different ways, and the differences determined how they responded to the Old World Exchange.

  Most important was how each empire dealt with its army. To confront the Xiongnu from the 120s BCE onward, the Han had developed huge cavalry squadrons, increasingly recruited from the nomads themselves, and as they perfected the “using barbarians to fight barbarians” policy in the first century CE they settled many of these nomads within the empire. This had the double consequence of militarizing the frontier, where Xiongnu fighters lived with little Han supervision, and demilitarizing the interior. Few troops were to be found in the heart of China, except at the capital itself, and fewer still were recruited there. Chinese aristocrats saw little to gain from serving as officers over “barbarians” stationed far from the capital. War became something that distant foreigners did on the emperor’s behalf.

  The upside for emperors was that they no longer had to worry that powerful noblemen would use the army against them; the downside, that they no longer had much of a stick with which to beat any noblemen who did become troublesome. Consequently, as the state’s monopoly on force weakened, aristocrats found it easier to bully local peasants, swallowing their farms into huge estates that the landlords ran as private fiefdoms. There is a limit to how much surplus can be squeezed out of peasants, and when the landlord was so near and the emperor so far away, more surplus was handed over to local masters as rent and less sent to Chang’an as tax.

  Emperors pushed back, limiting the size of estates aristocrats could hold and the number of peasants on them, redistributing land to free (and taxable) small farmers, and raising cash from state monopolies on necessities such as iron, salt, and alcohol. But in 9 CE the emperor-landlord tussle turned critical when a high official named Wang Mang seized the throne, nationalized all land, abolished slavery and serfdom, and pronounced that from now on only the state could own gold. His near-Maoist centralization collapsed immediately, but peasant uprisings convulsed the empire, and by the time order returned, in the 30s CE, Han policy had gone through a sea change.

  The emperor who replaced Wang Mang, Guangwu (reigned 25–57 CE), came from a propertied family, not one that drew its power from links to the old court. To restore Han authority, Guangwu had to work closely with his fellow magnates, and he threw his lot in with them, initiating a golden age for landowners. Growing as rich as kings and ruling thousands of peasants, these grandees virtually ignored the state and its bothersome taxmen. Formerly Han emperors had moved troublesome landowners to Chang’an so they could keep an eye on them, but Guangwu instead moved the capital to Luoyang (Figure 6.4), where the landowners were strongest and the magnates could monitor the court.*

  The elite began rolling back the state and steadily disengaging from its biggest budget item, the army. By the late first century CE, with the Xiongnu no longer a major threat, the great cavalry army that had been built to fight them was being left to fend for itself, which meant plundering the peasants it supposedly protected. By about 150 CE the Southern Xiongnu, theoretically vassals, were more or less independent.

  Nor was much effort made to reshape the army to meet new threats being posed by the Qiang, a name the Chinese used loosely for farmers and herders around their western frontier. Thanks perhaps to the clement weather of the Roman Warm Period, Qiang numbers had been growing for generations and small groups had moved into the western provinces, occupying land when they could, fighting and stealing when they could not. To keep this under control the frontier needed garrison troops, not nomadic cavalry, but the landowners of the Luoyang region did not want to pay for them.

  Figure 6.4. The end of the Han dynasty, 25–220 CE: locations mentioned in the text

  Some officials suggested abandoning the western provinces altogether and leaving the Qiang to their own devices, but others feared a domino effect. “If you lose Liang province,” one courtier argued, “then the Three Adjuncts will be your border. If the people of the Three Adjuncts move inward, then Hongnong will be the border. If the people of Hongnong move inward, then Luoyang will be the border. If you carry on like this you will reach the edge of the Eastern Sea, and that, too, will be your border.”

  Persuaded, the government stayed the course and spent a fortune, but infiltration continued. In 94 and again in 108 CE Qiang groups took over broad swaths of the western provinces. In 110 there was a general Qiang uprising, and by 150 the Qiang were as much beyond Luoyang’s control as were the Xiongnu. On both the western and the northern frontiers local landowners had to organize their own defenses, turning dependent peasants into militias, and the governors, forgotten by the state that had sent them there, also raised their own armies (and plundered their provinces to pay them).

  It must have been hard not to conclude that the Han had lost the mandate of heaven, and in 145 CE three separate rebellions demanded a new dynasty. For the great landowning elite, however, the cloud had a thick silver lining. The empire was smaller, tax receipts were dwindling, and the army was, in a sense, being privatized, but their estates were more productive than ever, imperial tax collectors left them alone, and war was but a distant rumor. All was, after all, for the best.

  China’s Panglosses had a rude awakening when the Old World Exchange burst onto this scene in the 160s. Plagues ravaged the northwest, where the Qiang were moving into the empire, and spread across the land. And rather than responding with strong leadership, the imperial court imploded.

  In theory, the hundreds of bureaucrats who filled offices at the palace in Luoyang lived only to put the emperors’ wishes into practice, but in practice (like civil servants in many eras) they had their own interests too. Most came from landowning families, and tended to be remarkably good at finding reasons not to do things that landowners found distasteful (like raising money for wars). Any emperor with ideas of his own had to work around them. Some emperors brought in kinsmen, particularly relatives of their multiple wives, to get things done; others turned to eunuchs, whose advantages I mentioned in Chapter 5. Astute emperors used both to great effect, but these agents, too, had their own agendas, and tried to make sure that emperors were not astute. In fact, they so arranged matters that after 88 CE no prince over the age of fourteen ever survived to ascend the throne. Court politics degenerated into backstairs intrigues among senior ministers, eunuchs, and boy emperors’ in-laws.

  In 168 CE, at the very moment Han China most needed leadership, palace eunuchs staged a coup against the in-laws of the newly installed twelve-year-old emperor, Lingdi. For almost twenty years, while epidemics raged and Xiongnu and Qiang raided, the court launched purge and counterpurge, claiming thousands of lives and paralyzing government. Corruption and incompetence reached new heights. Injustice sparked uprisings, and, unable to muster or command armies, Lingdi’s handlers authorized local strongmen to raise troops and do what they thought necessary.

  People cried out for explanations of this abrupt descent into chaos, and when neither Confucian rituals nor Daoist mysticism provided them, self-proclaimed visionaries filled the gap. In the Yellow River valley a physician won a great following by teaching that sin caused disease and that confession brought health. In the 170s he
went one step further: the dynasty itself, he concluded, was the ultimate source of sin and contagion. It had to go. “When a new cycle of sixty years begins,” he pronounced, “great fortune will come to the world.”

  But great fortune did not come. Instead, when the new calendar cycle began on April 3, 184, things got even worse. Even though pro-Han armies suppressed the rebels (known as Yellow Turbans from their headgear, yellow being the symbol of the new age), imitators popped up all over China. Heaven itself seemed to be showing its displeasure when the Yellow River flooded massively, displacing 365,000 peasants. A “Five Pecks of Grain” movement (promising freedom from sickness to those who confessed their sins and paid five measures of rice) turned Sichuan into an independent Daoist theocracy; the Qiang exploited the chaos and plundered western China again; the special commanders deputized to contain these threats made themselves independent warlords; and when the court did act, it only made things worse.

  In 189 Lingdi recalled the mightiest warlord, Dong Zhuo, but Dong wrote back saying, “The Han and barbarian troops under my command all came to me and said … ‘Our provisions will be cut off, and our wives and children will die of hunger and cold.’ Pulling back my carriage, they would not let me go.” When Lingdi insisted, Dong called his bluff, returning to Luoyang but bringing his army with him. Lingdi conveniently died as Dong approached, and the courtiers around Lingdi’s senior widow (who backed a thirteen-year-old as the new ruler) and the eunuchs (who backed an eight-year-old) set about murdering one another. Dong broke into Luoyang, massacred the eunuchs, murdered the older boy, and set up the younger as Emperor Xiandi. Then he torched Luoyang and wondered what to do next.

  The Han were no longer in control, but neither was Dong, because while the emperors’ managerial, high-end power had failed, their vaguely divine, low-end power persisted. No one dared proclaim himself emperor while Xiandi lived, but no one dared murder the boy king either. (Warlords, however, were fair game; Dong was assassinated in 192.) As the power brokers squabbled, using Emperor Xiandi as a pawn, the empire broke down into fiefdoms, the Xiongnu and Qiang took over the frontiers, and the high-end institutions that had seemed so solid melted into air.

  “My armor has been worn so long that lice breed in it,” the warlord and part-time poet Cao Cao wrote sometime after 197.

  Myriad lineages have perished,

  White bones exposed in the fields,

  For a thousand li [roughly three hundred miles] not even a cock is heard.

  Only one out of a hundred survives.

  Thinking of it rends my entrails.

  Cao contained his grief long enough, however, to snatch Xiandi and manipulate the boy emperor into making him the main player in northern China.

  Cao was a complicated man. He may well have been trying to restore the Han dynasty, casting himself in the time-honored role of wise adviser. Seeing how landlords had undermined the old high-end state, he tried to solve the military problem by settling his soldiers in colonies where some grew food while others trained for war, and the political problem by classifying the gentry into nine ranks, determining their positions in a meritocracy. Like Tiglath-Pileser in Assyria a thousand years earlier, he was cutting the magnates out of the picture, and until 208, when his navy was wiped out at the battle of the Red Cliffs, it looked as if Cao might pull China together again.

  Yet despite these efforts, Cao (thanks largely to an enormous fourteenth-century novel called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) has been remembered chiefly as the monster who destroyed the Han. In twentieth-century Peking Opera, actors wearing the Cao mask with its caked white makeup and black-lined eyes were always the villain audiences loved to hate, and in the 1990s Cao went high-tech, jumping to the computer screen as the bad guy in countless video games. He made it to bigger screens as the villain of a TV version of The Romance (in eighty-four episodes), and to the biggest screens of all in the costliest Asian-financed film ever made (The Battle of the Red Cliffs, costing $80 million; Part One was released to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Olympics).

  Cao’s bad reputation has more to do with what happened after his death than with his own misdeeds. After the battle of the Red Cliffs a balance developed among three main warlords, and after 220, when Cao’s son finally told Emperor Xiandi to abdicate, the country devolved into three kingdoms. The one that Cao founded, though, was always the strongest. It crushed one of its rivals in 264, rebranded itself as the Jin dynasty,* and in 280 raised a huge army and fleet that finished reconquering China.

  For the next decade, the post-Han collapse looked like a brief aberration, comparable perhaps to what had happened in the Western core after 2200 or 1750 BCE, when climate change, migrations, and famine caused state collapse but had little impact on social development. But it soon turned out that the fall of the Han was in fact much more like the Western collapse around 1200 BCE, with enormous long-term consequences.

  Battlefield victories could reduce the number of surviving warlords to one but could not change China’s underlying problems. The aristocracy remained as strong as ever and rapidly undermined Cao’s military colonies and meritocracy. Epidemics still raged, and the Dark Age Cold Period was making life harder not only for farmers in the Yellow River valley but also for the Xiongnu and Qiang. Between 265 and 287 a quarter of a million central Asians settled inside the Jin Empire. Sometimes the Jin welcomed the manpower they provided; at other times the authorities simply could not stand up to them.

  In this context, little things such as an emperor’s love life could assume huge importance. Rather carelessly, the Jin emperor sired twenty-seven sons, and when he died in 289 some of them hired the wildest nomads they could find to fight one another. The nomads, no fools, quickly realized that they did not have to settle for the wages they were paid: they could demand any price they liked. When a Xiongnu chief did not get his price in 304, he turned up the heat by announcing that he was founding a new kingdom. The Jin still did not give him everything he wanted, so his son burned Luoyang in 311, desecrated the Jin dynasty’s family tombs, and took its emperor prisoner, setting him to serve wine at feasts. Still not getting the loot they thought they deserved, in 316 the Xiongnu destroyed Chang’an, too, and captured the new Jin emperor, putting this prisoner in charge of washing cups as well as serving wine. Tiring of the game after a few months, the Xiongnu killed him and his relatives.

  The Jin state collapsed. Bands of Xiongnu and Qiang plundered at will across north China, and the Jin court, with a million followers in its train, fled to Jiankang (modern Nanjing) on the Yangzi River. The northern lands they gave up were home to some of the world’s most advanced agriculture, but under the combined impact of high death rates (as epidemics hit home) and high emigration, much now reverted to the wild. That suited the nomads who moved in from the steppes just fine, but for remaining farming communities it meant that famine also reared its head. In happier days, local gentry or the state might have stepped in with aid, but now there was no one to help. To make the misery complete, plagues of locusts devoured what surpluses the villagers still produced. New epidemics, perhaps carried by migrants from the steppes, brought yet more woes to the weakened population. Smallpox probably made its first appearance in China in 317, the year after Chang’an burned.

  The wars that Xiongnu and Qiang chiefs waged across this barren landscape were more like giant slave raids than clashes between high-end states. Rulers rounded up peasants, tens of thousands at a time, and herded them into territories around new capital cities, where the bondsmen tilled fields to feed armies of full-time cavalrymen. The horsemen, meanwhile, imported new weapons from the steppes—proper saddles, stirrups, and bigger horses that could charge while wearing armor and carrying armored knights—that made infantry virtually obsolete. Those Chinese aristocrats who did not flee south took to the hills, their dependent peasants crowding into huge stockades that offered the only refuge from marauding horsemen.

  The new states forming in north China (“The Sixteen Kingdo
ms of the Five Barbarians,” as Chinese historians contemptuously called them) were highly unstable. In 350, for instance, one state imploded in an orgy of ethnic cleansing, with native Chinese slaughtering Inner Asians. “The dead numbered more than two hundred thousand,” the official dynastic history says. “Corpses were piled outside the city walls, where they were all eaten by jackals, wolves, and wild dogs.” Other chiefs swarmed into the power vacuum this left. By 383 one lord briefly looked like he might unite all China; but as he closed in on Jiankang, an apparently minor defeat mutated into a panic-stricken rout, and by 385 his entire state had ceased to exist.

  Refugees fleeing south from the destruction of Chang’an founded an “Eastern Jin”* state at Jiankang in 317. Unlike the bandit kingdoms in northern China, this boasted a luxurious, sophisticated court and kept up the appearances of how Chinese royalty should live. It sent ambassadors to Japan and Indochina, produced magnificent literature and art, and, most remarkable of all, survived for a century.

  But behind the surface glitter, the Eastern Jin kingdom was as bitterly divided as any northern state. The former northern grandees who fled south had little interest in obeying the emperor’s commands. Some refugee noblemen clustered in Jiankang, becoming parasitic timeservers and feeding off the royal court; others colonized the Yangzi Basin and carved out estates in this hot, wet new homeland. They drove off indigenous peoples, felled forests, drained swamps, and settled refugee peasants as serfs.